Another (yawn) Anti-EP Article

Ok. Scientific American has a piece by JR Minkel on mating, which begins with the idea that evolutionary psychologists have “a simple theory of human sexuality.” (To his credit, he posted Buss’ reply on his blog.) This is a peculiar claim for two reasons. First, evolutionary psychologists use theories with considerable subtlety and complexity. The recent work on menstrual cycle effects, for example, correctly predicts changes in women’s preferences from very specific properties of men during specific points in their cycles. More generally, sexual strategies theory makes many textured predictions. Second, and related, compared to what? What are the competing theories? Take, for example, propinquity “theory,” the gold star on the report card of close relationships researchers in social psychology: People will tend not to have sex with people they’ve never met. (Ok, I’m simplifying. But only a little.) How does propinquity theory do on cycle effects, pathogen effects, or, heck, even the coarsest sex differences observed in this literature? As the kids are saying these days: Fail. The article presents Wendy Wood’s candidate for a replacement idea to explain human sexual behavior. I’ll get to that at the end of the post.

In any case, the article is about – and I was shocked, shocked! to see this – recent attacks on evolutionary psychology in the mating literature. The article reports some comments from Lynn Carol Miller, who is quoted as saying that, in the context of the Buss and Schmitt work, there were “huge gaps from what I’m used to as a scientist.” Wow. Strong words. Her objection? According to the article – and maybe she was quoted out of context – but it turns out that she believes that “the proper method is to use a scale such as time or money, which has the same interval between units, not the seven-point rating scale that Buss and Schmitt used.” The impact of this critique is diminished by the fact that, well… Dr. Miller uses Likert scales in her own published work (e.g., Miller, 1990; Miller et al., 2005). So, you know, it seems that it’s actually pretty much exactly what she’s used to as a scientist.

So, anyway, the article goes on to report that Miller did some work showing that college students, male and female, spend about the same amount of time and money pursuing different types of relationships. Ok, that’s interesting. It doesn’t make me want to give up Parental Investment Theory, but that’s fine.  I’m not actually sure that time and money students report that they spend on these things is the definitive assay of preferences or strategies, but I haven’t read the paper yet, so I don’t know precisely what the argument is.

It seems we have entered a new era. There has been a recent focus on the idea that, roughly, women are often promiscuous, and this is somehow seen to run contrary to the evolutionary psychology “narrative.” (Aside: why does the word “narrative” seem to have gotten a second wind? It’s like some sort of zombie word, lacking the good sense to stay dead and buried with the various disciplines that spawned it.) I find this puzzling, given the emphasis that evolutionary psychologists put on the benefits women gain from short-term mating over the last twenty years. Yes, evolutionary psychologists have predicted sex differences – and found them – but the argument was never that women gain no advantages under particular circumstances from using a short term mating strategy; the recent work on cycle effects illustrates exactly this.

But, anyway, to return to the issue of the complexity of one’s theories, the article reports that Eagly and Wood do have a replacement theory. Their idea, at least as far as they are quoted in the article, is that they “men and women have evolved to act in a lot of different ways.”

I think I’ll just leave that little gem right there.

Citations

Miller, L.C. (1990). Intimacy and liking: Mutual influence and the role of unique relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 50-60.

Miller, L.C., Murphy, S. T., Clark , L.F., Hamburger, M., & Moore, J. (2004) Hierarchical Messages for Introducing Multiple HIV Prevention Options: Promise and Pitfalls. AIDS Education and Prevention, 16 (5).

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